Computer of the year – 2010

iPad

No surprises here.

A year ago – it seems like a million years ago – I named the MSI Wind netbook the Computer of the Year.

Further, a few days later I wrote of the yet to be announced ‘iSlate’:

Such was my confidence in the iPad, finally released three months later in early April, 2010, that I bought a couple on the opening day and have since given away another half dozen to friends as gifts.

By this time next year another 50 million or so users will get the message but we early adopters have benefitted mightily from the unfair advantage this gadget confers.

So in nine brief months the iPad has obsoleted the netbook and created a whole new way of creating and consuming information, opening up sales to a demographic which would never touch a ‘computer’. Part of the device’s magic is that it really does not bear much resemblance to what we think a computer should look like. And you can take it with you, it weighs little and all you need is an internet – or maybe cell – connection to access the world.

So in a year which was decidedly blah for new gadgets, the iPad reigns supreme, easily being this consumer’s Computer of the Year for lack of any credible competition.

Computer of the year – 2010.

Alfred Stieglitz

Photographers

A change agent.

The American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) took photography out of its early frou frou era and into the modern world. He was not only a fine photographer, he was also a great promoter of other artists, including photographers, painters and writers, primarily through his 291 Gallery in New York. In all things artistic, Stieglitz was on the cutting edge of the avant garde.

The Steerage, 1908

His best known image is The Steerage where, as a passenger on board the first class section of a ship to France he chanced on the image of the fourth class passengers in what was known as ‘The Steerage’ – maybe because the people were herded in there like steers. Rent the PBS documentary on Stieglitz from Netflix and you will hear how, when he first saw the crowd, he was fixated by the straw topper and the white suspenders; he dashed back to his cabin for his monster plate camera, one exposure left, and captured this stunning image – no one had moved. Twenty-five years later a young Cartier-Bresson was doing much the same, albeit with a strong dose of surrealism added, but he could bang away over three dozen times, with his pocket sized Leica. Not that he needed to.

Even in his earlier work, Stielglitz’s sense of immediacy was in abundant evidence.

The Terminal, 1893

This is the New York location where horses pulling streetcars, before the days of electrification, were changed. The photograph is electric, not just for its historical interest but also because of the sense that you are there. You can almost smell what’s happening.

Stieglitz was a class act, selfless in his support of fellow artists not least, in later life, of his great love Georgia O’Keeffe, another transformational American modern painter.

Stieglitz in middle age.

The PBS documentary is an excellent place to start if you are new to Alfred Stieglitz.

Four displays

Displays

When you are desperate for screen space.

A while back I wrote about using the Air Display Mac application which permits use of the iPad as an external display. After adding my third Dell 2209WA monitor to my desktop rig, I revisited Air Display to see if it still functions, this time as a fourth monitor.

It does!

The iPad is being used as a fourth monitor.

Sure, cursor response on the iPad is a tad jerky as the cursor’s data stream is being sent over the air, but it’s more than acceptable as a peripheral for displaying a screen which rarely needs mouse action, like a live stock price chart, for example.

Here’s how I have System Preferences->Displays->Arrangement set up:

The rarely accessed screen is pushed out to the left.

Note that the blue screen area with the white menu bar is aligned at the base, not at the top – this makes sure straight lines remain straight, rather than stepped, as you mouse across. Also, by relegating the iPad display to the left or right you avoid having to access the jerky iPad screen’s base if that’s where you keep your application icons. I have mine set to hide except in the case of a mouseover, which is why they are not visible in the photograph above.

It was an accident, honest!

Software

The Vampire Squid of the Internet.

Rolling Stone’s resident shock journalist Matt Taibbi wrote about Goldman Sachs a few months back.

“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Well, swap ‘Goldman Sachs’ with ‘Google’ and ‘investment bank’ with ‘search engine’ and it still reads well.

I wrote of Google’s culture of theft recently, protesting its copying of copyright materials for their profit and their support of net neutrality for the ‘public good’ when the prime beneficiary is Google.

Now this:

Now, I simply despise Microsoft for the hours of my life they have wasted rebooting PCs and losing data, but as of now I’m switching to Bing for my default search engine in the naïve belief that they actually do a tad less evil than Google. There is simply no circumstance on earth which will have me change my opinion of Microsoft but, in this case, it’s the lesser evil. Even the iPad/iPhone have an option to do this – go to Settings->Safari.

Would you trust Google with anything? Garnering all this data in their drive-by shootings is no accident. A team of people wrote that code with the specific intent of theft and profit, and the code of ethics in a corporation comes from the top. You don’t suddenly spontaneously breed criminality in the lower ranks. Those workers take their clues from their managers, and so on up the tree. Just like at Goldman Sachs.

And when you find your stolen photographs on Google, well, good luck suing them.

Should you read of my untimely demise any day now, just look to the Google Hit Squad of Uzi-bearing ninja assassins.

Remote with an iTunes music server

iPad, Macintosh

A work in progress.

Download Apple’s free Remote app to your iDevice and you get a handy interface for managing your remote music server. I explained how I set up one of these in yesterday’s column.

Start the app on, say, the iPad and this is what you see:

The list of sources appears in the left hand column and the contents in the right. This is the ‘Artists’ view – chosen from the tabs at the base of the screen.

Switch to Albums and you get this – as you can see I still have some work to do to get cover art for all my albums:

And so on. Touching the four arrows at lower right switches you to a blank screen which acts as a touch pad, permitting remote control of menu selections for the AppleTV on the screen of your television. Nice, and a lot more reliable than using a mouse on the sofa cushion!

Touch the ‘AppleTV’ bar in the left hand column and you see your sources on one screen:

The ‘iMac music server’ is the old G4 iMac I set up yesterday to act as a source for all our recorded music.

What is missing, and why I captioned this piece ‘a work in progress’ is AirPlay functionality. You cannot select where to output sound, so when I want to do so, I have go to the iMac music server and do so in the iTunes application there, as I illustrated yesterday. Not a big deal and maybe a constraint placed on Apple by the modest processing power and RAM of the current iPad. Given that each of my three speaker options has its own volume control – TV, Office and Dining Room – I can change or mute any of these when needed. Still, it would be nice to be able to do this from the iPad whose control is limited to pause/fast forward/rewind and play.

The Remote app is nicely engineered, the price is right (as in ‘free’!) and you can download it from the AppStore.